Have I mentioned how much I love Nina Bouraoui? And that she’s stunningly beautiful on top of being politically poetic? I’m a quarter of the way through Mes mauvaises pensées and I could just…I don’t know…cry from happiness. That sounds hyperbolic, and I guess it is, but she’s done what even Colette couldn’t: she broke through The Wall and gave me French literature. Her style is deceptively simple, flowing stream-of-conciousness, gathering me up and sweeping me along in a rush of sounds and images. In one of her essays Jeanette Winterson talks about how literature, to be Art, must bring back visions, how the novel must evolve beyond plot into poetry, how it should open up new realities. I never, never thought I’d be able to experience that with French books. I thought at best I’d be able to hack through a Maigret mystery or a translation of Harry Potter. But I wandered around the bookstore downtown yesterday and realized I had a whole new library of words to play in. I want to write her a thank you note or something.

*******Dear Globe Theater Company,Could you possibly start your theatrical season a bit earlier? Like, late April? PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE? Pretty please? With a cherry on top? Cause my guide book says you don’t start giving performances till mid-May and I hope to be somewhere in Scotland by that point. I studied literature, I eat and sleep literature, you can’t possibly expect me to go to London and NOT see a performance of the Bard at The Globe. I went there for a high school trip once, and couldn’t even take a tour of it, there was performance on and I just stood outside, wistfully trying to catch some stray dialogue. You can’t do that to me again, okay? Have a heart. I don’t care what you put on, I’ll sit in the cheap nosebleed section and watch Henry the Umpteenth, Part 45, I’ll even watch Troilus and Cressida (which, after all, does have that bit where Patroclus is accused of being Achilles’ “man-whore”), anything at all, just do me this one teensy favor and I’ll sell you my soul and sign the contract in blood, if you want. Deal?Andygrrl

So yesterday I was actually looking forward to teaching at Problem School. Things have been going well there, lately. I had a new lesson plan prepared for the older students and couldn’t wait to try it out; because if I had to talk about American high schools and football games and cheerleading and homecoming one more time I was going to put my head in, well, the microwave, because we don’t have an oven. The problem with the American High School Lesson Plan is that the kids like it, it’s something they’re interested in, which means I’ve been doing this song-and-dance number, regurgitating all that heteronormative mythology, like 20,000 times.

Plus, the kids all laugh riotously at my freshman year photo; I always end up showing it, they don’t have yearbooks in France. I shake my head at that little girl now, my lank hair and huge glasses and steel braces and flannel shirt.

Anyway, I had a new lesson plan: The Academy Awards. Movies ought to hold their interest, by golly. I put together a transparency with pictures of the winners and posters of the nominated films, asked them to describe what they saw. Who is this? How is he dressed? How does he feel? Why? What’s in this poster? What do you think it’s about? Which award did it win? It was good because the only movie they’d heard of was Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, so they had to do a lot of speaking and speculation and guessing. They knew George Clooney but not Reese Witherspoon or Ang Lee.Next was Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and that’s when I learned that capote in French is slang for condom.Picture me standing at the overhead, wondering why a room full of 15 year olds are suddenly snickering at me.“Well,” I snapped, “in English Capote is a name and it means ‘really great writer’, okay? So who can describe how he’s dressed?”

Still, not as bad as the time I inadvertently drew a rather phallic depiction of the Great Lakes. Hormones. The atmosphere’s soaked with them; I’m gonna catch their acne if I don’t get out soon. Baby Dyke has taken to blushing a vivid shade of crimson when she talks to me, poor thing.

plaisir being the opposite of s’enerver, of course. I didn’t get homesick for Thanksgiving or Christmas, but St. Patrick’s Day is giving me the blues. My folks run in the annual marathon, my sister dances in the parade, and me, when I wasn’t playing Handel or Bach I was scraping out “Toss the Feathers” or “Gary Owen” (though I will say that my personal vision of Hell is to be trapped in a crowded, smoky gym forced to dance three-hands I can’t remember while the Clancy Brothers play “The Sweets of May” on an endless loop). And my family’s not even Irish (as far as we know, which isn’t very far).

So I thought I’d cheer things up around here a bit. Some stuff that makes me happy:

Les Calamités. I found them in the Verdun library and promptly burned myself a copy. Kind of a French version of the Go-Gos or the Bangles.

Celtic Hangover. Irish dudes in France. The lead singer sounds like he’s been smoking a pack a day since he was four.

drinking on the job. Yesterday we had a St. Patrick’s Day party in the salle de professeurs during lunch. Three kinds of cake, Guinness, and Killian’s. And the month before we celebrated a birthday with champagne. It’s the school with problem students and unhelpful teachers, but they make up for it with free booze.

old French ladies in skirts, heels, and stockings who zoom around town on their motorbikes while wearing neon green crash helmets

snuggled up in bed with a cup of tea and a copy of Pride and Promiscuity: The Lost Sex Scenes of Jane Austen. I found this on the small bookshelf of English books at Leclerc (the French version of a Super Walmart, though hopefully less evil). I decided it was fate. Who else in the entire town of Verdun would have the interest, much less the ability to read such a book? It was Meant To Be.

dancing lessons with Laurent. He got roped into dancing lessons at a nearby village and dragged me along to be his partner. The boy has no rhythm, but we learned the Fox Trot. The salsa totally bamboozled us though.

Patti Smith’s cover of “Gloria”. Good golly miss molly. Patti Smith can make me hers any day of the week.

French dyke bars. Despite the Parisian attitude and their complete inability to make a decent vodka tonic. It’s 100% dyke space, and I can’t get enough of it. Plus, one-armed butch bartenders so hot they make me forget my French. “Je…euh…voudrais…erm…”

after endless months of rain, the sun has come out

chocolate mousse Pims

my friend JJ, who, in addition to being a hot, intelligent, funny, kick-ass feminist, actually delivers when she says she’ll make you a CD of pictures.

Nina Bouraoui, Les mauvaises pensées. French lesbian novelist who’s won the Prix Renaudot (whatever that is). A little Jeanette Winterson laced with Virginia Woolf. It’s beautiful, intricate and deceptively simple, and I get it. Not just the sense, but the poetry. The rhythm, the feel, the imagery of the language. I have broken through The Wall. It’s still tough going (I’m only 30 pages into it), but the work is finally paying off. It’s like learning to read all over again, and just as exciting.

Jeanette Winterson. I’d resisted Winterson for awhile, out of sheer orneryness, convinced she was probably too stuffy and faux literary for my tastes. But these last months she’s been stalking me–I found her for cheap my first visit to Shakespeare and Co, where the salesgirl proceeded to tell me I have to read The Passion, I’ve been running into her on blogs, people emailing me, “Oh, you should really give Winterson a try”, and now I’m totally eating crow. I’m in love. She’s so…so…so brilliant, and beautiful, and passionate, and funny. I’m gonna have to do some book blogging soon.

Even though I don’t go to Mass anymore, my parents still send me Easter care packages.

The track “A Postcard to Henry Purcell,” on the Pride and Prejudice soundtrack, which makes me wish I had my violin with me.

watching John Wayne movies in French. Cowboy movies are my guilty pleasure, but I figure it mitigates the inherent racist and sexist underpinnings if he’s speaking faggoty French, right?

Il pleut de gouines!/It’s raining dykes!, a bilingual French dyke ‘zine I found in Paris, full of hilarious cartoons, cake recipes (“gateau lesbienne!”), and new vocabulary words, such as goudu, the French version of lezzie.

sunshine lovely she isbrilliant i-n-t-o-x-i-c-a-t-i-n-g breezefrom another world entirely un- important are love poems? when all around us global death death death suffering dollars dictators struck down infants shrunken to bone are any notions of love not idle with all this? brilliant and sensitive she has wonderful hands her mouth when she speaks is oh…how important i meanis one woman’s embarrassed frenzy for another?concealed, nurtured in private considering iraq, love poems important? life nearly crushed out of an entire people warfare raging, people paying with their blood? their blood?romance is bourgeois product ofconsumer culture love irrelevant? wonderful eyes and witty witty witty wow how she drops her definite articles accents odd syllables smiles her prepositions off in? at? how you say? her words her voice so lush and her mouth when she speaks is oh!Giovanna Janet Capone

I’m sitting in the salle de professeurs yesterday, checking email etc, during break. All the teachers are there, talking and laughing together about something. I don’t usually pay any attention.Break ends and they all leave, and I hear the door slam shut. I turn around to see one of the English professors I work with, Michele; she’s my favorite, young and friendly. We get along great. But right now she looks furious.“Michele, ça va?” I ask her.“Do you know what just happened here?!” she demands. All the professors were discussing a particular student, she explains. He’s slow, and a little out of it. His behavior is often erratic and bizarre. The other kids bully him. Apparently his behavior today was stranger than usual, they were all laughing about it.“They were making fun of him,” she fumes. “Everybody knows his dad beats him, and they’re laughing at him. I’m so sick of this place. They’re all like a pack of dogs, hunting.” Florian must have got hit harder than normal today, he was so out of it. M. Lerouge, the principal, commented on how big his father’s hands are. Florian lives all alone with his dad, and according to M. Lerouge, men just aren’t as patient as women. But a little discipline never hurt anyone.There’s nothing Michele can do; she’s not Florian’s teacher, she doesn’t see him everyday, she doesn’t think Social Services would listen to her. She’s tried talking to the assistant principal and got nowhere. M. Lerouge, obviously, is useless.“There must be a hotline or something you could call for advice,” I said.Another teacher joins the conversation. There’s nothing we can do, he says. We must wait.“Wait? Wait for what?? Wait for his dad to kill him? He already has bruises!” Michele sputters.But it’s quarter-after now, she has an appointment, and I have to catch the bus.

It’s a regular column in SCUMgrrrls: “Two or Three Things that Piss Me Off”. I woke up with a rant in my head, and though the universe keeps trying to cheer me up today, I refuse to do so. I have a Vesuvian temper; centuries of quiet and then BOOM you are Pompeii going “Holy Shit!!” as I incinerate you with the pyroclastic flow of my wrath.

So let’s begin, shall we?

Street Harrassment. I have not been hassled at all wandering alone around Paris at all hours of the night (probably because I’m a white girl in the rich part of town). Verdun, however, provides so little entertainment that apparently annoying the foreign chick has become the new sport of choice. Yesterday I was walking to a friend’s house, trying to find his street, and I passed a group of teenage boys. How they knew I was American I don’t know (must be the faux hawk, it hasn’t really caught on with French girls), but as soon as I accidentally caught their eye (fatal mistake) I was hounded with catcalls: ” ell-ooooo!USA! I love you! Beautiful!” I pretended I didn’t speak English. When they failed to elicit a reaction they changed tactics: “BITCH! Motherfucker! Bitch!”What I did: Nothing. Four strapping teenage boys against one 98 pound weakling are lousy odds.What I should have done: Taken up a martial art like I keep saying I will so I wouldn’t be afraid to tell them to fuck off in three languages.This experience, however, was not as bad as the previous one, where three teenagers, two girls and a guy, with a toddler in a stroller (???) followed me several blocks, crossing the streets even, all the way home, throwing bread at me. I still don’t know what the fuck that was all about, but they found it hilarious.

Puberty. I’ve decided that adolescence is a highly contagious crowd disease and those afflicted with it should be quarantined until they make a full recovery. I fucking hate teenagers (with notable exceptions). I hated them when I was a kid, I hated being one, and I still hate them now. Working at a collège, I miss the worst of it, but I still have to deal with them far too often. I wouldn’t mind having children as long as I could pack them off to boarding school for about 7 years once they hit age 13. Give me a squawling infant any day.

Men. I fucking hate men today, individually and as a class. Thank Sappho and Artemis I am not in the least sexually attracted to them. I shall explicate les chose qui m’enervent:Matt. We were all hanging out yesterday, I was paging through my already well read copy of Bitch. After inquiring about the magazine, he sniffs “I’m not a feminist”, in that tone that implies that clearly feminism is an embarrassing 70s anachronism, like macramé wall hangings and bell-bottoms.What I did: “Yeah, well, you don’t have to be, do you?” Trying to get across his priviledge as a white guy, but I think I only implied that Feminism Is Girl Stuff and Not For Men.What I should have done: Grabbed him by the shoulders and shouted “WHERE THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU’D BE WITHOUT FEMINISM, YOU SELF-SATISFIED, SMUG GAY DOUCHEBAG?? I bet you think Queer Eye for the Straight Guy is revolutionary, don’t you? Or that the whole point of gay rights is to shack up behind marriage certificates and white picket fences like straight people? Don’t you know the gay rights movement couldn’t have got off the ground without feminism first?!?!” I swear to god, sometimes gay men piss me off more than straight men. At least some straight men actually know and love women. Gay men wear their misogyny like some fashion statement, and it’s so painfully ironic. They have nothing in common with lesbians other than being homos.Ricardo: Latino macho culture at its most insidious. Totally nice decent person who nevertheless thinks women exist for his pleasure and entertainment. Too many stories to relate, but no wonder he was dumbfounded when I came out to him. A woman whose entire life does not revolve around her relationship to men? Error! Does not compute! Brain exploding! Oh wait, lesbianism, like two chicks getting it on in porn, yeah, that’s hot!What I’ve done about it: nothing. Bad feminist. I suck.What I should do: channel Hot-Headed Paisan and bash him in the head with a two-by-four.Laurent: again, nice guy, only when I explained how I have a minor in Women’s Studies he retorted, “Do they have Men’s Studies?” Oh god! We’re not kissing male ass for two seconds! The Apocalypse is coming!What I did: “Actually, there’s a whole field of Gender Studies that includes Masculinities…”What I should have done: “Fucking EVERYTHING is Men’s Studies, you moron. See this? It’s The Second Sex. Read it, because you can.”

And that’s another thing: Disney. As if their patriarchal propaganda masquerading as movies wasn’t insult enough, their corporate greed has fucked with the U.S. copyright law, which means we won’t get an actual decent translation of La deuxiéme sexe until I’m in my 70s. And my French just isn’t up to it. I cry uncle. It has defeated me.

Straight people. Shut the fuck up. You don’t know what you’re talking about. We live in completely different worlds. If you want to hear my thoughts and my experience, I don’t mind, but you have to actually listen. Don’t tell me what to feel or what you think I really experience, because you don’t know. You have no fucking idea what the closet is like. So don’t you dare dismiss my words. Of course you can’t see what I see, it’s called heterosexual priviledge and priviledge of any kind blinds you to the realities of others. Go watch Brokeback Mountain and read Zami and pay fucking attention, and then we’ll talk.

the Catholic Church. Just because. Also, I’ll use them as a stand-in for everything that taught me to be self-effacing, quiet, placating, Nice: religion, tv, movies, my parents. I grew up as the peacemaker in an angry household (it was loving, but very tempestous). So I learned not to make waves, don’t make trouble, make nice, swallow your opinion, don’t speak your mind. Which is why I’m so bad at confrontation. Why I don’t call bullshit when I see it. I’m the fucking Neville Chamberlin of feminism: appeasement! appeasement! What I didn’t manage to express in my post on stealth feminism is that I’m trying to overcome that, to put a face on feminism. Just like people tend to be more gay friendly when they know that they know gay people. But I tend to err too much on the side of Niceness and let comments slide and whitewash my opinions. I don’t want to be That Shrill Self-Righteous Harpy. Which is stupid, because you can never win the popularity contest anyway. You’re either the Ugly Man Hating Bitch, just like they say, or you’re failing to challenge to their fascist expectations of feminity anyway. I have button that says “I’m so sorry if I’m alienating some of you, YOUR WHOLE FUCKING CULTURE ALIENATES ME.” I should pay more attention to its message. I’m so, so fucking tired of adapting to them, accomodating their expectations, speaking their language.

Sigh. See, this is what blogs are for. The cathartic airing of grievances.

([John Cleese] And now for something completely different.[/John Cleese])

Saturday night on the Champs-Elysees, at Le Balzac, a swank three screen theater. The line for Orgueil et Préjugés stretched out the theater and down the street, but I must see this movie again, and somehow I squeak in. The only free seat left is right in the front row, between an elderly couple and a pair of young boys, geeks, bad haircuts and big glasses, probably not more than eleven years old.The lights go down, the music starts up, and I’m swept away once again, twittering Mrs. Bennet and giggling Lydia and Kitty, the locals at the Meryton assembly twirling and bowing and curtseying.“Do you dance, Mr. Darcy?” the sparkling Elizabeth Bennet asks him.“Not if I can help it,” he snaps, and I laugh in satisfaction. Perfect.I feel a tap on my shoulder. It’s the little boy next to me.“Qu’est-ce qu’il a dit à-t-elle?”“He said he doesn’t like to dance,” I answer. Little boy leans over and whispers in his friend’s ear.….I didn’t think Keira Knightley’s Elizabeth could get anymore luminous, but she does, she’s got pearls in her hair, and lord knows a woman can never be too fine when she’s all in white, at the Netherfield Ball, and oh no, Tom Hollander’s weasely Mr. Collins is asking her to dance. It’s odd, being the only one in the theater who gets the joke about his “lightness of foot.” It doesn’t really translate into French.Tap, tap.“Qui est Monsieur Collins?”“Il est le cousin de la famille…er…fin…,” I stumble a bit, not really having the vocab to explain an entailed estate. But he seems to get it, leans over and whispers to his friend again.…The lights come up and there’s me, sitting in a warm glow of Austenitis (n. Nervous condition or emotional state induced by prolonged exposure to Jane Austen novels or cinematic adaptations thereof. Symptoms include unfocuzed gaze, deep sighing, increased clarity of diction, a tendency to speak in elaborate, archaic grammatical constructions, and the desire for muslin dresses. No known cure but with proper attention and care it can be managed, patients living an otherwise normal life).Tap, tap.“Excuse me. We are here for English class. I can ask you questions?”I smile. “Yes, you can!”“Is book old-fashioned?”“Yes, it’s a very old book.”“You read novel?” miming with his hands.“Yes, many times.”Pointing to the screen. “Is same?”“Well, yes, it’s the same as the book.”“You like?”“Yes, I like it very much! Did you like it?”“Oh yes! Very funny!” And I don’t think he was being polite, either; they both laughed at all the comic bits in the movie.It was so cute, watching them discover Austen for the first time. And feeling like I’d discovered her for the first time, all over again. It is a truth universally acknowledged (come on, you know I gotta) that film adaptations of Jane Austen inevitably fail to satisfy the Janeites (n. pl. Person whose devotion to Austen and her writings border on religious fervor. See also fanatic.) How ever little known this view may be to a filmmaker upon his first embarking on an adaptation, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the Janeites that Austen is considered as the rightful property of her own admirers. Which is one of the reasons that I consider myself a “renegade Janeite”; I’ve never met an adaptation I didn’t like. Or at least find something to enjoy, even if it was only to revel in the it’s-so-awful-it’s-hilarious quality (I’m thinking of the only adaptation of Northanger Abbey, which missed the point by so many miles it’s in a different universe). I’m one of the few Janeites who loves Rozema’s ’98 adaptation of Mansfield Park (and no, not because of the wildly inappropriate lesbian subtext).And I love this movie. I’m in complete accord with Mary-Ann Johansen’s review : this adaptation is alive. It dances and laughs, to the point that I don’t even mind that they cut out the best lines. It made me fall in love with Pride and Prejudice all over again. I’ve never been much of a purist. If I want a historical documentary, I’ll turn on the History Channel. Austen chronicles emotion and the human heart like no other, and if a film manages to capture that, I’ll give it a lot of leeway in terms of historical accuracy and faithfulness even to the plot. So, yeah, Lizzie wouldn’t be wandering around without gloves and a hat, and no, Donald Sutherland’s Mr. Bennet isn’t really the character from the book, though he is delightful, but that’s just nit-picking for me. It always puzzles me how defensive and outraged Janeites get over the film versions. Like Karen Joy Fowler said, everyone has their personal Austen, and everyone feels like JA is theirs, speaking intimately to them, so we’re very protective of her. Especially with P&P (oh no! I used an ampersand! Grab the smelling salts!): Darcy and Lizzie are like our “personal representatives in the field of shagging, or rather, courtship”, to quote Bridget Jones. We take it personally when people misunderstand her or somehow threaten our ideas of what Austen is. And Janeites show their devotion by memorizing biographical munitae and historical details and whole paragraphs of her writing; it’s the test of a True Janeite. I do the same; I get a kick out of reading film critics reviewing Austen adaptations, as if they actually know what they’re talking about (and they almost never do). It’s fun, obsessing over all that, snarking on the mistakes and nitpicking the details, but it’s not the point. Films are interpretations, necessarily, much like literary criticism; but Janeites take Austen so personally that we get offended when someone’s opinion contradicts our own. Which I think is a shame. I once read an essay by Eve Sedgewick, “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl” (yes, you read that correctly), a provocative piece suggesting that Marianne’s over-the-top Romanticism in Sense and Sensibility was an expression of auto-eroticism, among other things. She made some interesting points, but I spent most of the time laughing over the ridiculous academicese (at one point she describes Elinor’s pupils as “twin sphincters of the soul”). My point is that no amount of wierd criticism or lousy adaptations is going to damage Austen. That’s all just opinion; she is Art. She doesn’t need defending. So relax already.I’m glad I didn’t let my qualms about Keira Knightley scare me away from the film. At first I thought, “Ugh, Rising Starlet as my Lizzie? I.think.not.” But she really impressed me. She’s no Jennifer Ehle (who could be?), but her Lizzie is just as bright and lovely. So what if she doesn’t wear a fichu (or comb her hair, for that matter). Knightley gets Lizzie’s vivacity and spirit. As for Matthew MacFayden, I’m going to be totally stripped of my Janeite credentials when I say he is the Darciest of Darcys. Or as Mags put it, “What a very fine, strapping, juicy hunk of British woof on the hoof.” This is the Darcy I find when I read the novel. I like Colin Firth’s version, but I never really bought him being Majorily In Luv. When Lizzie tells him at the end that she does love him and will marry him, it falls so incredibly flat, because he’s just standing there. I guess he’s trying to show that Darcy’s emotions are too strong for words or something, but he looks for all the world as if someone merely remarked that they found Bath very congenial. MacFayden’s stammering declarations of passion are perfect. And look, if you can accept Firth’s Darcy jumping into ponds and running around Pemberley in his skivvies dripping wet, then having Darcy and Lizzie meet on a mist-covered field shouldn’t be too much of a stretch either. The secondary characters, like Mrs. Bennet, are a bit more lifelike and less cartoony than they are in the BBC version. Needless to say, I loved Charlotte’s speech to Lizzie, I don’t care if it’s kosher or not. Judi Dench was impeccable as Lady Catharine, as I knew she would be. Caroline Bingley got short shrift, but oh well. I loved the ending. I got the European version, so no smooch, which fits, but god was I rooting for a kiss at that point. I just hope the alternate ending isn’t too mushy; you got to have a delicate balance with these things. I’d rather have no kiss than have them slobbering over each other.And now, as if I wasn’t missing my books enough as it is, I’m dreaming of my Everyman Library hardback editions of Austen, hunter green cloth covers with cream woven paper (acid-free, bien sur), gorgeous black and white dustjackets, sigh. P&P is definitely up in the Austen Rotation this year (I read one Austen novel every year).Well. That should have got the worst of Austenitis out of my system, hopefully. I only have the soundtrack to console me until I can get home.